Allen Zadoff: Food, Girls, and Other Things I Can't Have

O. Douglas lifts his hand in a wave, and I’m just starting to wave back when this girl behind me says, “Hey, O.!” in a really desperate voice.

He wasn’t waving to me. He was waving to the girl behind me.

God has it in for me. Let me tell you how I know.

I am not the fattest.

You might think that would be good news for a kid in high school, but it’s not. There is actually something much worse than being the fattest: I am the second fattest.

It’s true. I am the second fattest kid in the history of Newton High School. At least if you’re the fattest, you have something to brag about. You’re the very worst. You’re the bottom of the barrel. You are King of the Freaks.

But second fattest? What is that? That’s just another fat kid, a sad statistic of America’s obesity epidemic. Everyone cares about obesity in general, but nobody gives a crap about the second fattest kid at Newton High. I saw a documentary on the BBC Channel the other night called The 687-Pound Teenager . It was about this kid in Britain who is the size of a small mountain range. That’s the kind of world we’re living in. You have to weigh more than a quarter ton to get any attention. Being second fattest is hardly worth a mention.

Who is the fattest? His last name is Warner. That’s God’s other little joke. He’s Warner and I’m Zansky, and nearly everything in our high school involves alphabetical order. That means the two fatties are always in proximity, orbiting each other like planets in a gravitational tug-of-war. Warner and Zansky. Zansky and Warner.

As I walk into homeroom, I say a silent prayer that Warner has moved away over the summer. But the minute I get through the door, I see him. He’s standing in the back of the room, flipping through a Trig textbook and smiling. Warner is always smiling. It’s like he’s happy to be fat or something. It’s insane. Today he’s smiling and sweating. Not just a little bit. He’s sweating like a rodeo bull.

I stop dead in my tracks. I see why he’s sweating.

They changed the desks.

They’re not the folding-desk-and-chair combo we had last year. Those were the kind where you can choose to flip up the desk or keep it down, sort of like a tray table on an airplane. These new desks are not like that. They’re the ones where the chair has a half desk locked into place on the side. With this kind of chair, you either fit or you don’t.

Warner doesn’t. At least he’s not sure if he does. That’s why he’s milling around the back of the room. He’s acting like he’s at a party, relaxed and casual (not that he’d ever be relaxed and casual at a party), but I can tell it’s an act. I hate that I know what he’s thinking. I hate that I’m thinking the exact same thing.

Will I fit?

This is the Physics of Fat. Where do I fit? Each new situation is a science experiment. Chairs, desks, doorways, amusement park rides, airline and movie theater seats, pants, elevators—they all raise the same question. What mass will fit into what volume of space, and what amount of force will it take to get it there?

Today’s experiment: Homeroom.

An empty desk awaits the mountain of Warner, and two seats away, another waits for me. Between the two desks sits Nancy Yee, a Chinese girl built like a plastic drink straw, and Chen Yu, another Chinese girl who outweighs her by eight ounces or so. The poor girls are doomed to spend high school sitting between Warner and me. Even on a normal day, the back row of our homeroom looks like this:

It can’t be good for Nancy or Chen’s reputation, but I have to say it doesn’t seem to bother Nancy Yee. She doesn’t care that three Yees could fit into a desk that holds half a Zansky and one-third of a Warner. She just sits there drawing in a sketchbook, staring down at the pages through glasses thick enough to focus a spy satellite. She’s wearing plaid shorts over purple tights and some kind of vintage green sweater with sparkly purple flowers all over it. My sister watches, like, twenty-seven modeling shows a week. This is a combo that would definitely make her head explode.

“Hi, Andy,” Nancy says like she’s happy to see me. She flips her hair back, and I see a double streak of acne, both sides of her face breaking out where her greasy hair rubs against it. “Did you have a nice break?” she says.

“It was okay,” I say.

“What do you think of the new desks?”

I think Nancy just won the Stupid Question of the Year Award. But I don’t say anything. I have to remember that Nancy is oblivious. A girl who has the body mass of a Twinkie can’t imagine not fitting into a chair.

“Take your seats, please,” Ms. Weston says. She’s really dolled up for the first day of class, almost like she’s going to a party rather than school. Some guys call her Desperate Doris because she’s always trying to look younger. Even worse is that fact that she’s the Spanish teacher. There’s something sad about a woman without romance teaching a Romance language. It makes me want to cry and eat a paella.

Ms. Weston calls roll. People are starting to look at the fat kids standing in the back of the room.

Goddam Warner. I wish he would sit down or quit school or change his last name. Something. Anything. But no, he only sweats and pretends to read the stupid Trig and shuffles from one elephant hoof to the other.

“Aren’t you going to sit down?” Nancy says. I want to kill her, too.

Ms. Weston calls, “Tackenberg, Thomas, Tiburon…”

It’s now or never.

I suck in my gut, say a quick prayer to the god of physics, and aim my bulk towards the narrow opening between the desk and the chair…

Plop .

I’m in.

It takes a little adjusting, a few grunts of effort, and an embarrassing shifting of blubber around my belt—but I fit.

Ms. Weston’s at the end of the alphabet, and she calls Warner’s name. He answers from a standing position. She looks at him strangely, then looks at the empty desk. She’s about to say something, when she decides to move on. I’m kind of relieved for him.

“Zansky,” she says.

“Here,” I say proudly and from a sitting position.

I fit, and Warner doesn’t.

For now.

Good news. I’m in AP American History this year. They started a new pilot program where they moved some of the top sophomores into AP a year ahead of time. Me, Eytan, Nancy Yee, and a couple other kids are actually mixed in with juniors and seniors.

Even better news. The AP American History classroom has tables rather than desks. And there’s a new teacher, Ms. Hartwell. She’s younger than all the other teachers. Someone said she just got out of graduate school. That means she’s not giving us the same tired old lesson plans. She has fresh ideas.

“History is subjective,” she announces in the second minute of class. “Who can tell me what that means?”

I want to raise my hand. I want Ms. Hartwell’s first impression of me to be special. I’m not just some fat sophomore who got accelerated for good grades. I’m an intellectual. I’m going to get a PhD someday, too, but I’m not sure what subject it will be in. I look around, and none of the other sophomores are raising their hands. Everyone’s afraid, especially with these older kids around. There’s a super high potential for embarrassment.

A senior with wire-rim glasses pops his hand up. I think his name is Eric. “‘Subjective’ means it’s an important subject,” he says.

“Not quite,” Ms. Hartwell says with a smile on the corner of her lips.